


The Hillwoman

by drladybird



Category: Mass Effect - All Media Types, Mass Effect: Andromeda
Genre: Bad things happen to Reyes, Character Study, Colonialism, Gen, Keema has her own agenda, Sorry Reyes I do like you, Where are they getting food canonically?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-15
Updated: 2018-09-15
Packaged: 2019-07-12 12:17:39
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,802
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15995063
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/drladybird/pseuds/drladybird
Summary: After the Collective's defeat, Keema Dohrgun makes her own deal with Sloane Kelly. This is her land. She's not leaving.





	The Hillwoman

**Author's Note:**

> Sorry again, Reyes!  
> Seriously, where are the Outcasts getting their food? This question needs answering!

**Keema Dohrgun**

 

It’s a high-risk trick, but what better options are there? I didn’t make myself clan-mother, or claim a stake in kett-infested Kadara Port, by caution.

The Collective’s broken, and those who wouldn’t swear loyalty to Captain Kelly have been thrown into the desert. Well? If an alien’s cast out to die, and found by a Clan Dohrgun scout and given clean water and brought home, they tend to start liking us better then Kelly or Reyes. And out of those who swore loyalty to Kelly, a lot of them lied.

I still can’t get my head around the aliens’ communication technology, but my new friend Ellek Vahae used to be a comms repairman on Sur’Kesh. Kelly exiled Ellek and his brother Marra, and Marra died in the desert. Some Dohrgun boys found what was left of Ellek and patched him up, so he works for us now. Oh, and he’s got four other brothers in Kadara Port who’ll kneel to Kelly to save their skins but who dream about revenge every day. So between Ellek and his brothers and a great deal of good luck, I can project a life-size hologram of myself into Kelly’s throne room.

The timing’s important. Kaetus needs to be there. To call him the brains of the outfit would be unfair to Kelly, but he’s the cool one, the long-term thinker, more interested in survival than revenge. And I need as many witnesses as possible.

I wear the armour I use to hunt kett and the face paint all my fathers wore. And I’ve found an old, elegant chair to lean on the way she leans on her throne.

Ellek pokes at his little remote control and grins at me. “Three, two, one, _go!”_ The cave fades around me and I’m facing Sloane Kelly on her throne. People yelp in shock and step backwards. Kelly looks mildly startled.

Arissa Kaetus sits at her right hand, wearing his white armour but helmetless. They took a hacksaw to his crest – the chitin plates are jagged stumps a few inches long. That’ll take months to grow back.

“Captain Kelly!” I declare, leaning forwards. “I’m here to make a deal with you!”

Her furry eyebrows jerk up. “But not in person, Dohrgun?”

Kaetus is hard to read, but he’s leaning forward eagerly.

“I thought you’d have some hard feelings. I can’t blame you.” I hear Kaetus is still moving his arms gingerly – they kicked in the bone shield over his shoulders, and half his arm muscles are hooked up to the inside. “Still, Vidal Reyes is no use to me now. Would you like him?”

People start yelling in the background. Kelly’s eyebrows rise further. “He alive? Did my best to shoot him when he ran.”

Kaetus has his head tilted, one yellow eye fixed on me.

“You did,” I agree, “but he was running and he was lucky and all you did was lame him a bit. We patched him up, but he’s no more use to me. I ran with him because he offered me a share in Kadara Port. It wasn’t a good share, but it was more than you were offering. He lost, you won. Dohrgun and Noskos and the other hill clans are still right here, so I want peace.”

Kaetus fixes me with his other eye. “Peace in exchange for Reyes?”

“No, no. I’ll throw him in to sweeten the deal – I know you don’t want him free and making trouble. But what I really want is _a share in what my family built._ ” More background yelling, but not from anyone who matters.

Kelly lowers her head. “ _I_ hunted the kett out of Kadara Port, while little Scott was in his glass coffin. Can your clans do that?”

“Clearly, no. But think about what I’m offering. We’re in these hills and we’re not leaving. We can’t match your technology _yet,_ although we have enough of it that the reverse engineering’s going fast, but we know the country better than you ever could. You’ve fought us before. We can’t face you head on, but we can be a thorn in your side or we can be allies.”

“You’d fight _me,”_ Kelly growls, “when you could fight the kett?”

I shrug. “We don’t like the Outsiders, we don’t like the kett, but anyone halfway sane prefers the Outsiders. Still. Do you want trade deals, or do you want us trading with the Nexus and leaving you out of it? Do you want to be hunting us through our own lands, which you don’t know at all, because you can’t trust us not to try another coup? Do you ever want power outside this port? I’ve got power in these hills, and I could share that with you. The hill clans listen to me.”

“Pity so many people aren’t remotely sane,” Kaetus says, leaning further forward. “ _Shut_ it, you lot,” and the background yelling mostly stops.

“I have a little power over that, too. If I speak out publicly against the Roekaar, and have all my children and their children speak against the Roekaar, you’ll see far fewer idiot teenagers joining up with them. But if I do that I’ll have twice the number of hardliners calling me a traitor and trying to kill me, so I won’t do it for nothing.”

Sloane leans forward. “So. You’d betray me. Then betray Reyes. And then expect me to trust you?”

“Of course I don’t expect you to trust me. I’m expecting you to take me back as an advisor and _listen_ to me this time. Because you need allies in the hills if you want to keep your job.”

She raises her eyebrows, thinking that over. Kaetus looks me up and down, up and down.

Kelly, well, she’s an odd-looking thing with her flat maneless face and crest of long fur and legs bending the wrong way, but with a little practice she looks like a woman. Kaetus, though? With the skin stretched directly over the bones of his face, and his eyes set so deep, and I know under the hardsuit he has grey bone armour for skin? My heart starts beating too hard if I look at him the wrong way.

Concentrate on the alien joints of his mouth. Concentrate on the fangs (none of them broken – the Collective had more sense than to hit him in the mouth). Those are the teeth of something you don’t want biting you, but they’re not kett teeth.

“Reyes betrayed me,” I point out. “He talked a great deal about how we’d be equal partners once he got rid of you, but he was very very light on the specifics. He meant to use me as a puppet ruler, a piece of decoration so he could claim legitimacy, and he told me we were equals. I took that, because it was more than you were offering me, but I’d call that betrayal.” I grin at her. “He swore on his life and soul he’d give me your throne. I suspect he just meant the fancy chair.”

She smiles back.

“So I’m not happy about turning him in,” I go on, “and I’ll miss him, and I’d rather you killed him quickly and put his head on a pole than whatever else you might be planning. But he was as trustworthy as clear lake water, and I’m loyal to my clan before any foreigner or alien. It looks like we’ve got no choice but to bow our heads to one bunch of aliens or another, so I’ll bow down to whoever treats me and mine best. At least you know how to say what you mean. Old pirates like me, we appreciate that.”

“I heard you were _very_ close to Reyes,” Kaetus rumbles.

“Hah!” Someone’s been keeping his ear to the ground! “Reyes wanted an alien concubine, to kneel and serve him. Well, so did I, and let me assure you he was good at service.” I’ll miss those skills. And I’ll miss getting drunk with him. He wrote me poetry.

Kaetus chuckles. Kelly stares at me. “Noskos would have skinned you alive for that!”

“ _Farah_ Noskos would have skinned me for that, absolutely. But do I take orders from Three Knives Farah? The rest of Noskos disowned her years ago! Over these last few months, two of her mothers’ sons took river-oaths to kill her on sight!”

She frowns at me. Looks like she didn’t know about the oaths.

“You see?” I go on. “This is why you need an advisor who knows how these hills work. Most of Noskos decided Jaal ama Darav was an ally _because_ he killed their cousin, and then he came around pretending to be sorry and offered penances and expiations he knew full well they’d refuse, and now half the clan would lick his feet if he asked. Or Ryder’s. Why are you letting some upper-crust homeworld boy know Kadara better than you, when you live here?”

“I take it you don’t like Darav?” Kelly asks.

“Why would I? Pelaav jungle boy, thinks coming from the homeworld makes him better than the rest of us, loves his ethnic capes so much he wears one with his battle armour. Have you heard what he’s got to say about Kadara? Sure, he’s angaran. You’re human – what do you think of Foster Addison?”

She raises her eyebrows. “Point taken. Still, are you seriously expecting me to trust you after –” She waves at Kaetus and he dips his head to give me a better view of his wrecked crest.

“Of course not. I’m expecting you to act out of self interest and to see that our interests should align. You’ve had food shortages, I know, and even now you’d all be in trouble if your hydroponics broke down? We know how to farm the desert. _We_ haven’t been hungry. So you could keep evicting us from our farms and taking the harvest, and then there’s no harvest next year and some very angry farmers coming after you – kill them if you like, but that’ll just get their cousins on your trail, and let me assure you they won’t run out of cousins – or you could buy food from us and we could teach you how to grow your own. Even in the high desert, there’s herbs to eat and animals to hunt, and we could teach you how if you paid attention. _Dextro-amino_ animals too. Of course, we never domesticated any of those, we always called them false meat, but we can trap a few and sell them in town if we have a trade agreement!”

Wonder how long it’s been since Kaetus ate something that wasn’t yeast-based nutrient paste (highly nutritious, I hear)? Look at the way he’s twitching his complicated mouth bits. I think he’s either eating something imaginary or trying not to drool.

People are made of false meat, in this day and age. I’m negotiating with a man made of false meat. He has too many jaws and half an exoskeleton. It’s been that kind of year.

“You’re trying to bribe me with meat?” he says, sounding amused.

Pretty much! “Is it working?”

He snorts. “I’d rather be bribed with some help against the kett!”

“That’s no problem! The kett have better technology than us, you have better technology than the kett, so give us some of your fancy weapons and show us how to use them and we’ll have them speared like a roast thaa! Fewer kett – better for everyone!”

Kelly opens her mouth, almost certainly planning to say she wouldn’t trust me with Milky Way weapons, but then she shuts it again. Probably remembered that I’ve got much worse enemies than her. Or that if she doesn’t arm us then the Nexus might do it first, and really, who does she want us to owe?

“You see,” I point out, “we’re not leaving, and you’re not leaving, so we’d better come to a deal. We’ve been in these hills a long long time, Dohrgun and Noskos and Darrae and Kahyia and the minor clans. When the universe shattered, some of us scurried back to the homeworld before the Scourge blocked travel. My ancestors stayed right here. When the water turned undrinkable? We built filters. When spaceships came from Aya and Havarl, and a bunch of Darav types ran around telling everyone to throw away this planet and act exactly like them? Some of us listened. Some of us threw away their clans and ran off to frolic in waterfalls. My ancestors stayed on their lands. When the kett came? We ran and we hid in the hills, and they claimed the port but let me assure you, they didn’t dare to venture far outside it. And now you’ve taken the port? We’re still in the hills. These days, you don’t even have to be religious to believe this country was made for us, or us for it. We didn’t leave for the kett, and we’re certainly not leaving it for you. So we’d better start getting along.”

“Hard to get along after you’ve already betrayed us once,” Kelly growls.

I shrug. “Weren’t you with the fleet at Shanxi?”

“Kaetus had nothing to do with that idiocy. Shanxi wasn’t personal.”

A few of her thugs fought on the other side of That Idiocy, though, and that’s never bothered her.

“Relay 314 was hardly a _betrayal_ ,” Kaetus points out. “More of a horrific misunderstanding.”

I raise my eyebrows at him. “Or an example of how _not_ to make first contact with aliens? Followed by everyone learning from their mistakes and making second contact properly?”

Kelly takes a deep breath. “We can meet, on neutral ground, to discuss terms,” and suddenly there’s a burst of cheering. “What do you _want,_ Dohrgun?” She’s smiling and her tiny eyes are bright.

“What do I want? Bring me back as your advisor and listen to me like Reyes _didn’t._ Give me a share in the running of the port. Treat my people like _people_ and quit classifying us as some kind of desert wildlife, and we’ll quit classifying you as some kind of kett. Kaetus sits at your right hand. Put me at your left.”

Kaetus tries to stare me down. His little round eyes are too bright and too piercing and far too deep in his skull, and he doesn’t blink, but I don’t look away. You think you scare me, soldier from another galaxy? You’re nothing but a man.

He relaxes and he laughs softly. “Hope you’re planning to do half my paperwork. Hope you’re not planning to share _all_ my duties!” – and with that he snaps off a glove and leans over and cups his bare hand around Captain Kelly’s face.

She puts her hand over his and glares at me.

 “Hah! Don’t you worry, Kaetus, I’m not the sort to eat another’s fruit!” Not without his permission, anyway!

Look how far he has to lean, and the odd way he’s putting his armoured glove back on - his shoulders definitely aren’t moving normally.

“Now,” I add, “where do we find neutral ground? That might take some arranging!” Let’s not bring Scott Ryder this time! “What if I give you a day to think things over, I’ll call you back this time tomorrow, and we can start discussing terms over comm?”

“What?” she says, “In front of half the port?”

I shrug. “I can’t get this hologram anywhere more private, I’m afraid.”

“That’s fair,” she says. “I’ll just have to clear everyone out tomorrow. And I want to know how you got it in here!”

Well, that’s Ellek’s four brothers’ cue to get out of town in a hurry. They’ve packed and they know which guards will look the other way and where to meet my scouts.

I smile sweetly at her. “Let’s discuss that tomorrow.”

She sighs. “I suppose that’ll have to do. I will speak to you tomorrow, Keema Dohrgun, at 1400 hours. Understood?”

“Understood! I’ll speak to you tomorrow at 1400 hours!”

She nods dismissal and fades away, and I’m sitting in a cave again while Ellek Vahae fiddles with his remote control. You could argue that Ellek’s a stranger creature than Kelly or Kaetus – they had fathers, they were never fish – but he’s a less foreign shape and those huge dark eyes are more endearing than unnerving. And he’s clan now, or as good as. That makes anyone less alien.

He looks down at me and nods firmly, pressing his thin lips together. “Not what I want, my Lady,” he says. “What I’d _want_ is to throw her into the desert, watch her bake and die, let the desert beasts chew on what’s left. But that wouldn’t bring back my brother. We do what we can with what we have.”


End file.
